The air in the bubble had changed. The usual damp, briny stillness was gone, replaced by a taut, vibrating pressure that made the water itself feel like gelatin. I blinked the sleep-grit from my eyes. My three-hour nap, guarded by Proti's lattice and Mr. Fin's silent vigil, was over. The quiet was a lie.
I look at the lobby to see if the 8/8 for the next meal have arrived.
[Abyssal Lobby, Judges present 8/8]
It wasn't a matter of looking. It was a matter of feeling. The bubble's curved membrane was no longer a smooth, shimmering barrier. In eight distinct, evenly spaced points, it stretched grotesquely inward, deformed by immense, external pressure. From each bulge, a thick, umbilical-like tendril of pure void-stuff had punctured through, their tips quivering mere feet from where I sat. They weren't solid, but manifestations of focused attention, dripping a viscous, psychic brine that hit the bubble floor with soft plips. Where each droplet landed, it didn't soak in; it crystallized instantly into jagged, glowing glyphs that skittered across the sand before etching themselves onto the sleeves of my shrimp pajamas:
[GUEST STATUS: HUNGER MANIFESTATIONS – 100%]
Mr. Fin was no longer a looming silhouette at the edge. He had positioned himself with monumental intent, his immense grey bulk floating vertically between me and the invasive tendrils, a living portcullis of scale and shadow. The water around him was so still it seemed frozen, a wall of suppressed violence. His dorsal fin, a blade of fractured space, moved slowly, deliberately, carving shimmering, ephemeral letters into the thick air:
[PRE-GAUNTLET INSPECTION: 17 MINUTES REMAINING]
Each stroke of his fin left a trail of cosmic frost that evaporated with a scent of iron and distant supernovae.
Proti's protective lattice, which had hummed a stabilizing lullaby around our vanilla, was now in distress. The gelatinous mass convulsed, its interlocking barbed pseudopods spasming. The barbed nodes themselves were glowing a feverish red, and from their tips rose a thin, acrid smoke that smelled unmistakably of scorched sugar and panic.
Beneath a fresh drift of abyssal sand that had sifted down from the trembling membrane, STAUST's blue pane flickered feebly. A line of pearl text tried to assert itself:
[INGREDIENT ALERT: VANILLA POLYP OUTGROWTH DETECTED ON PROTI'S CORE. INTEGRITY COMPROMISED.]
The message was partially obscured. Where one of NightSnack's lingering drool-stains hadn't fully dissipated, it was actively eating through the membrane like a psychic acid, sizzling and warping the view, a festering reminder of the debt recently settled.
The eight hungry tendrils pulsed in unison. A wave of pure, ravenous intent washed over me, making the golden veins in my pajamas throb in sympathetic, anxious rhythm.
"Mr. Fin," I said, my voice small against the pressure. "Good morning."
He didn't turn. His starry eyes were fixed on the tendrils. His tail gave a single, minute flick. A new line, sharp and final, joined the countdown in the air:
[COMMENCE PREPARATION.]
Right. No time for sleepy confusion. The ingredients were here. The guests were literally knocking. I took a deep breath, the dense air filling my lungs with the taste of brine, ozone, and impending judgment.
"Proti, become milk," I commanded, my tone shifting from sleep-soft to focused. "Mr. Fin, cool it. Staust, tell Arti-san—my Artist class—to make it smooth and delicious." I settled into the sand, crossing my legs, my carapace plates clicking into place. A sudden, mundane horror struck. "Ohh, no. I forgot glasses to put the ice cream inside." I looked past Mr. Fin's bulk, toward the faint, spiraling impression of NightSnack's greed still smeared on the membrane. "Night! Loan some! Make them… sparkly."
The reaction was a symphony of chaotic compliance.
Proti's entire being convulsed. My command didn't ask; it triggered a fundamental rewrite. Its gelatinous mass didn't just ooze—it liquefied with a violent, inward shudder. From its core, geysers of thick, pearlescent, vanilla-laced mucus erupted upward, strands of it hanging in the water like bizarre, sticky kelp.
Mr. Fin's gills flared wide with a sound like a ship's hatch blowing. He didn't gently exhale cold. He rammed his colossal snout forward, through the very center of Proti's transforming, chaotic mass. Across his obsidian scales, arcs of raw cosmic static crackled, jumping from plate to plate with tiny, soundless flashes. Where his energy met Proti's secretion, reality flinched. The mucus didn't just chill; it flash-froze in a churning, spiraling vortex that looked like a milk-white typhoon captured in a jar.
STAUST's display erupted from the sand not as a pane, but as a halo of jagged, blue shards that orbited the freezing vortex. Pearly text, refracted through the chaos, spun into view:
[ARTIST-CLASS SYNTHESIS ACTIVE: EMOTIONAL TEXTURE STABILIZATION – 32%]
From the festering shadow-maw stain on the membrane, NightSnack's influence responded. Not with an offer, but with a sarcastic, literal granting of my wish. Seven objects were disgorged from the void—spiraled glass vessels, beautiful and cruel. They were formed not from sand, but from compressed anguish-ice, so cold they made the surrounding water steam with prismatic mist. They floated toward the vortex, but as they neared Proti's still-pulsing, polyp-ridden core, the glass itself began to fracture with hairline cracks, leaking streams of frozen light.
The ice cream mixture—a swirling maelstrom of memory-milk and abyssal frost—hung in the center. Its surface was already wrong. It wasn't smooth. Tiny, crustacean-like nodules were forming, where my nostalgia-drawn vanilla collided with the unforgiving physics of the deep.
A simple, elegant spoon, carved from a single piece of dark coral, appeared in my hand, offered by a tendril of shadow I knew was Mr. Fin's doing. Time to stir.
I reached into the vortex. The resistance was immediate and shocking. It was like stirring solid rock. The spoon cracked against the surface with a sound that wasn't a click, but a deep, groaning crunch, like ancient glaciers calving into a silent sea.
"Why is it so hard to stir? SO HARD!" I grunted, leaning my whole body into it. My hair fell into my face. I blew a strand away, my brow furrowed in furious concentration. "CARAPACE PAJAMA, HELP ME!"
As if waiting for the command, the segmented plates along my forearm whirred to life. Tiny, intricate servo-sounds emanated from within the chitin. From the seams between plates, thousands of microscopic bristles, like the legs of a shrimp, extruded and fused with the coral spoon, reinforcing it. I pushed again.
The viscous mixture seized. It wasn't getting smoother; it was becoming a single, stubborn mass. NightSnack's borrowed glasses vibrated violently on the sand, their spiral grooves filling not with creamy dessert, but with thick, vanilla mucus that crystallized instantly into jagged, lactose stalagmites.
Proti's milk-core convulsed in sympathetic agony. The vanilla polyps dotting its surface ruptured, spraying ropes of glowing golden syrup into the mix.
STAUST's orbiting shards pulsed a warning:
[MEMORY CONTAMINATION DETECTED: 89% CORRUPTION]
My reinforced spoon, now fused with my pajama's tech, bent at a sudden, impossible angle mid-stir, the laws of physics groaning in protest. Mr. Fin's dorsal fin twitched in sharp, irritated sync with each of my labored, scraping attempts. His gills released thin streamers of cosmic static that filled the air with the smell of a forgotten freezer, left open for decades in a dead city—a scent of stale cold and lost treats.
"Land-grub." The shark's growl vibrated through the water, low and taut. "You're stirring hunger, not ingredients."
His tailfin flicked, not at me, but toward the lobby tendrils. They dripped again, this time painting a new, frantic countdown in bioluminescent brine directly onto my pajama-clad knees:
[GAUNTLET COMMENCEMENT: T-300 SECONDS]
My spoon-handle, strained beyond its limits, finally snapped with a sound like a bone breaking. The utensil-head shot off, ricocheting off one of NightSnack's cracking glasses with a ping before embedding itself deep in Proti's quivering mass. There, it pulsed with a weak, bioluminescent light—a failing, metallic heart. Thin, white organic feelers sprouted from its edges, tapping a frantic, irregular Morse code against Proti's membrane. The rhythm perfectly matched my own panicked, shallow breaths.
This was wrong. All wrong. I wasn't making joy. I was feeding despair.
A fresh spoon, this one gleaming and cold, etched with spirals that hurt to look at, appeared before me, offered by a tendril of NightSnack's lingering shadow. I grabbed it, my jaw set. Sweat beaded on my forehead from the strain, a purely human reaction in this inhuman place.
"YOU CAN'T MAKE ICE CREAM HUNGRY!" I shouted at the vortex, at the tendrils, at the universe. "BECOME DELICIOUS!" I plunged the new spoon in. "I WILL NOT FAIL!"
The shadow tendril retracted the moment my sweat dripped from my brow. The droplets fell into the churning mixture.
They didn't dissolve. Each pearl of sweat transformed into a tiny, perfect sphere of concentrated brine that hung suspended in the cream. STAUST tagged them instantly:
[EMOTIONAL SALINITY INGRESSION: 12% ABERRATION]
The polyps on Proti ruptured completely under the stress of my frantic stirring, spraying filaments of golden mucus that crystallized in mid-air into fleeting, heartbreaking images—
[MEMORY SHARD: GRANDMA'S ICE CREAM PARLOR (CORRUPTED)]
—before dissolving into the stench of burnt plastic and the phantom pain of a childhood sunburn.
Mr. Fin had seen enough. His dorsal fin, a blade of pure negation, sliced through the chaotic soup before me. His gills ejected a focused stream of cosmic static that didn't just cool the mixture—it flash-froze the entire, seizing mass into a single, spiraled monstrosity. It hung in the water, no longer fluid. Its surface pulsed with thick, vein-like channels of frozen lactose that throbbed in a slow, sick rhythm, perfectly synchronized with the faint, hungry vibration still emanating from NightSnack' shadow.
The lobby tendrils shuddered, thrilled. Their countdown on my knees accelerated:
[GAUNTLET COMMENCEMENT: T-180 SECONDS]
My carapace pajama's forearm whirred at a critical, screaming frequency. From the seams, a bioluminescent fluid—the color of overheated motherboard lights—began to leak, dripping into the sand with a smell of melting wiring and long-lost childhood electronics.
And then, a miracle. Or a catastrophe.
The spiraled monstrosity of ice cream… detonated.
But not into pieces. Into light.
It burst into a supernova of tiny, bioluminescent shards, each one a frozen speck of vanilla and memory. They didn't fall. They shot outward, embedding themselves in the bubble's membrane like a million glowing pins. Where they stuck, they didn't just glow; they formed intricate, swirling constellations. And each constellation spelled out the same damning verdict:
[MEMORY CONTAMINATION: 92%]
The ice cream was gone. In its place, hanging at the center of it all, was a new creation. A smooth, perfect spiral of soft-serve ice cream, glowing with a gentle, internal light. It sparkled, as if dusted with ground diamonds and captured starlight.
"WOOOOAH!" My frustration evaporated, replaced by pure, stunned wonder. My face reflected the soft glow. "IT IS ALL SPARKLY NOW! LIKE STARS!" I turned, beaming, the panic of moments ago forgotten. "Can Chiari try some too, Mr. Fin?"
I reached out a finger.
The universe intervened.
The nearest throbbing lactose vein on the sparkling spiral burst. Not with liquid, but with a spray of vanilla-infused brine that crystallized the moment it left the main mass. Jagged, amber shards formed mid-air, spelling out a sharp warning:
[CONSUMPTION HAZARD: TEMPORARY POLYP GROWTH DETECTED IN 3/8 JUDGES]
Mr. Fin's jaws, vast and full of needle-teeth, snapped shut with a CRACK that shook the bubble. They closed millimeters from my outstretched hand, a barrier of absolute finality. The shockwave sent the amber shards tinkling to the sand.
Beneath the beautiful spiral, Proti's mass convulsed. Its ruptured polyps weren't just oozing now; they were extruding strange, spoon-shaped protrusions that tapped listlessly against the cracked carapace of my pajama forearm. The rhythm was the same as my last, desperate stir. Tap-tap-scrape. Tap-tap-scrape.
I looked down at my hands, the ones that had stirred the chaos into sparkles.
They were… funny.
My fingers twitched, independent of my will. I stared. The skin between my fingers had become translucent, pulsing with a faint golden light. The tips of my fingers were no longer quite fingertip-shaped; they had segmented, softened, becoming disturbingly similar to the pseudopods Proti used when it was scared.
I giggled, a nervous, bubbling sound. "Hahaha. Why are they so funny?"
STAUST's constellation-display on the membrane shattered, the warnings dissolving. The blue pane reassembled itself before me, but it was fractured, showing multiple lines at once:
[MEMORY ASSIMILATION IN PROGRESS: 47% COMPLETE]
[WARNING: EMOTIONAL ARTIST CLASS FEEDBACK LOOP]
The pane acted as a mirror, reflecting my distorted hands back at me from a dozen different angles—a kaleidoscope of my own creeping transformation.
Mr. Fin's dorsal fin moved again, not writing words, but carving a single, severe glyph into the water itself—a symbol that translated directly as
UNBONDED NOSTALGIA LEAKAGE.
The glyph bled dark, cold static that smelled of a VHS tape left to melt in the sun.
From the periphery, where NightSnack's shadow had been, a new presence made itself known. It wasn't greedy vibration. It was a profound, stillness. The very quality of light in that corner of the bubble deepened, thinned, as if space were being stretched into a long, silent corridor.
[User Y0g_S0g0th (The Unraveling Geometry) notes the recursive self-modification. Interesting. Appending to 'Artist-Class Anomaly' dataset.]
The observation didn't appear as text, but as a sudden, perfect understanding that blossomed coldly in my mind, leaving no trace but a faint aftertaste of dying mathematics.
The lobby tendrils drank in the spectacle. Their countdown on my knees sped up, the numbers blurring: .
[T-97 SECONDS]
My carapace plates ached in sympathy with NightSnack's hungry frequency, clicking a frantic counter-rhythm.
I had to finish. I had to present something.
Ignoring my weird hands, I turned to the sparkling, spiral ice cream. I smiled my best, most confident smile. I cupped my hands—my weird, pulsing, semi-translucent hands—beneath it, as if offering a precious gift.
"I present my work!" I announced, proud, to the STAUST pane, to the tendrils, to the abyss.
STAUST's display exploded into a frantic analysis:
[SUBMISSION ANALYSIS INITIATED…]
[…VANILLA POLYP CONTAMINATION DETECTED IN 100% OF SAMPLE.]
[…MEMORY INTEGRITY: COMPROMISED.]
[…AESTHETIC PROFILE: ACCEPTABLE.]
Proti, loyal to a fault, launched itself upward. Its mass didn't attack; it engulfed my outstretched arms in a cool, sudden sheath of protective mucus, its barbed pseudopods forming a living cage around my polymorphing fingers, shielding the judges from the direct sight of the artist's instability.
The beautiful ice cream spiral detonated a second time.
This time, it dissolved into a fine, golden mist that hung in the water. The mist didn't fall. It crystallized around each of the eight lobby tendrils, forming delicate, suspended ornaments around their pulsating tips:
[MEMORY SHARD: FIRST ICE CREAM CONE (DISTORTION: 94%)].
The tendrils recoiled slightly, as if presented with something both alluring and poisonous.
Mr. Fin exhaled. A torrent of cosmic brine, colder than the void between stars, washed over the crystallized mist. It flash-froze everything into jagged, beautiful, amber stalactites that hung from the tendrils like grotesque jewelry.
My carapace forearm gave a final, dying whirr. The plates had fused permanently where Proti's mucus sheath met them. My fingers, trapped inside, twitched. Each tiny movement released a puff of vanilla-scented static that STAUST dutifully, sadly, tagged:
[EMOTIONAL ARTIST CLASS: UNCONTROLLED OUTPUT. FEEDBACK LOOP SUSTAINED.]
A cold loneliness cut through the chaos. Mr. Fin hadn't spoken since his warning. He was just… there. A wall. A statue.
"Mr. Fin?" My voice was small again. "Are you still there? Are you no longer talking with me?"
I looked at him. Really looked. His massive head was turned slightly. His colossal maw, usually a threat of needles and shadows, was dusted with a fine, sparkling frost—the fallout from freezing my ice cream monstrosity. It made him look like he'd just taken a bite of a winter galaxy.
"MR. FIN?" The loneliness spiked into a sharp fear. "DO YOU LIKE IT MORE THAN ME?"
I waited. The bubble held its breath. The tendrils stopped pulsating.
Y0g_S0g0th's silent observation pauses
Mr. Fin's jaws, dusted with stellar frost, snapped shut.
CRACK.
The sound was final. It was the sound of a door slamming in the depths of space. The amber stalactites on the tendrils shattered, raining down hard, crystalline notes around us.
His obsidian eyes, swirling with slow-dying nebulae, reflected not the ice cream, not the bubble, but me—my distorted hands encased in Proti's sheath, my worried face. Golden syrup, leaked from my own transformation, beaded on his serrated teeth like strange, luminous dew.
"Land-grub." His voice didn't boom. It vibrated, a deep, tectonic grumble that traveled through the water and up through the sand into my bones. It was the sound of a continent settling, of an ancient, weary truth being acknowledged. "I don't eat."
He paused, letting the absolute negation of the statement hang in the water.
"I witness."
The words dripped with a cosmic disdain, not for me, but for the very premise of the Gauntlet. For hunger. For consumption. He was the guardian, the referee, the impassive eye. Not a participant.
As if to punctuate this, his dorsal fin sliced through a new projection STAUST had timidly generated:
[CONSUMPTION LOG: C'THULLUS THE EVER-HUNGERING - CALORIES ABSORBED: 0]
Proti's mucus sheath around my arms detached with a sound that was horribly organic—like Velcro being torn from sunburnt, sensitive skin. It retreated, leaving my hands bare.
They were normal.
Just my hands. A little dirty with sand and glowing brine, but normal. The translucency was gone. The pulsing gone. The weird, pseudopod-like segmentation had receded.
I stared at them, flexing my fingers. The ice cream spiral, now stable and sparkling, hovered serenely. The frantic countdown on my knee had stopped at [T-30 SECONDS] and was fading. The lobby tendrils' bioluminescence had dimmed to a calm, waiting pulse. NightSnack's shadow-maw, cheated of a dramatic failure, dissipated with a petty, popped-bubble pfft. It left behind only its seven spiraled glass vessels, now pristine and floating, waiting to be filled.
The chaos was over. The product was ready.
I sat back in the sand, exhausted, my carapace pajamas clicking softly as I relaxed. I waited.
The eight tendrils leaned in. Not aggressively, but with a dreadful, silent purpose. Each one touched the sparkling ice cream spiral. There was no sound of consumption. The spiral simply… diminished, absorbed into their nebulous forms.
STAUST's display finally cleared, erupting from the sand not as a warning, but as a formal results screen. Blue panels arranged themselves in a circle, each one displaying a stream of incomprehensible biometric data for a different judge.
[JUDGE 01: GASTRIC RESONANCE – 78%]
[JUDGE 04: POLYP REGRESSION – COMPLETE]
[JUDGE 07: NOSTALGIA ASSIMILATION – SUBOPTIMAL]
Proti, now cohesive again, quivered near NightSnack's glasses. With a tired pseudopod, it carefully guided the remaining ice cream—a smooth, sparkly, perfect soft-serve—into each of the seven vessels. STAUST, with palpable reluctance, generated a tag that floated above each glass:
[FINAL PRODUCT: VANILLA ICE CREAM (ABYSSAL VARIANT, MEMORY-RECONSTRUCTED)]
The accompanying chemical formula wasn't a formula at all, but a swirling, nauseating knot of glyphs that seemed to move when you didn't look directly at them.
Mr. Fin's dorsal fin moved one last time. Not writing in light, but carving directly into the bubble's membrane with a grinding, physical finality. The material peeled back under his fin-tip, revealing the glowing substrate beneath as he etched:
[RATING CALCULATION: 4.3 / 10]
The numerals oozed iridescent fluid that dripped down the curve of the bubble, smelling faintly of disappointed kindergarten teachers and the freezer-burned dreams at the back of a broken refrigerator.
A memory stirred. A simpler, crueler grade.
"What is my school grade?" I asked, looking at the 4.3. "I remember you gave my rice an F."
STAUST's display went mad.
It fractured into a recursive, endless series of panels, each one nested inside the other, a visual representation of infinite regression. In the center of the madness, two grades burned with cold, pearlescent fire:
[ACADEMIC TRANSCRIPT: RICE SUBMISSION (GRADE: F)]
[CULINARY EVALUATION: ICE CREAM SUBMISSION (GRADE: D-)]
Proti flinched from the violent light. Mr. Fin's gills flared as his fin moved again, adding a third, devastating line not far from the 4.3:
[CUMULATIVE GPA: 1.2 / 10]
The numerals dissolved as they formed, dripping iridescent droplets that reeked of cafeteria milk left to curdle in a locked, forgotten locker.
The fossilized rice grain, still floating with a residue of vanilla bioluminescence, pulsed weakly. Its amber surface reflected the final, crushing analysis STAUST projected:
[PROGRESS ANALYSIS: ARTIST-CLASS POTENTIAL - 88TH PERCENTILE]
[PROGRESS ANALYSIS: TECHNICAL PROFICIENCY - 2ND PERCENTILE]
My carapace pajama plates, as if understanding the verdict, clamped instinctively tighter around my body, a mechanical hug. My hands, thankfully normal, curled into fists in my lap.
Then, a chime. Different from STAUST's. Softer. A sound of growth, not judgment.
[Experience Calculation: .....]
[Second Dish: Nebula Vanilla Ice Cream with Phantasmal Vanilla Aroma (Grade D-)]
[Exp 0/250]
[Exp +3500]
The numbers began to fly.
[Exp 250/250]
[Level Up!]
[Exp 0/500]
[Level Up!]
[Exp 500/500]
[Level Up!]
[Exp 2500/2500]
[Level Up!]
[Exp 250/5500]
[User Chiari Lvl 2-6]
The cascade of light and sound was dizzying. With each Level Up! chime, a faint, warm energy washed through me, a counterpoint to the cold disappointment of the grades. The golden veins in my pajamas glowed brighter, then settled into a deeper, more stable pattern.
When it was done, the familiar, calm blue pane of STAUST solidified before me, its text pearly and clean.
[STAUST]
[ABYSSAL COOKING SYSTEM]
[USER DATA]
[NAME: CHIARI]
[LIFEFORM: F]
[OWNER: C'THULLUS THE EVER-HUNGERING (LVL. 456 COSMIC SHARK)]
[PET: ENDLESS FACETED PROTOZEAN ESSENCE OF SATIATION]
[LVL: 6]
[CLASS: EMOTIONAL ARTIST]
[EXP: 250 / 5500]
I sat in the quiet bubble, the glowing sand warm beneath me. The lobby tendrils were retracting, their hunger momentarily abated.
[Abyssal Lobby, Judges present 4/8]
[ NightSnack left. ]
[ Y0g_S0g0th's silent attention has withdrawn. ]
[Abyssal Lobby, Judges present 2/8]
Mr. Fin was a motionless cliff-face once more.
I had gotten a D-. My GPA was a pitiful 1.2.
But I was Level 6.
I looked from my status screen to my normal hands, to the empty space where a sparkly, problematic ice cream had been, to the shark who didn't eat, but witnessed.
A slow, weird smile touched my lips. It wasn't a happy smile. It was the smile of someone who had just failed upward, spectacularly, in a system they didn't understand.
"Okay," I whispered to the data, to the silence, to myself.
The path was clear. I was terrible at cooking.
But I was getting really, really good at being an Emotional Artist.